TAUS Blog

Mark Seligman

Dr. Mark Seligman is founder, President, and CEO of Spoken Translation, Inc. His early research concerned automatic generation of multi-paragraph discourses, inheritance-based grammars, and automatic grammar induction. During the 1980’s, he was the founding software trainer at IntelliCorp, Inc., a forefront developer of artificial intelligence programming tools. His research associations include ATR Institute International near Kyoto, where he studied numerous aspects of speech-to-speech translation; GETA (the Groupe d’Étude pour la Traduction Automatique) at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France; and DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz) in Saarbrücken, Germany. In the late 1990s’, he was Publications Manager at Inxight Software, Inc., commercializing linguistic and visualization programs developed at PARC. In 1997 and 1998, in cooperation with CompuServe, Inc., he organized the first speech translation system demonstrating broad coverage with acceptable quality. He established Spoken Translation, Inc. in 2002.

TAUS has kindly requested a blog series on current topics in automatic translation. As an opening salvo, here’s a sneak preview of the forthcoming TAUS report on speech-to-speech translation (S2ST). The report, co-authored by Alex Waibel, Andrew Joscelyne, and myself, will attempt a broad view of the field’s past, present, and future. For this appetizer, though, we’ll restrict our view to a brief snapshot – a selfie, if you like – of selected technical accomplishment at the current state of the art. (The report will include interviews with several additional participants.)